Article: Williams & Boyle (2008) – Clickers in Courses for Multiple Majors

More from my round-up of articles on clickers in the health professions.  This time, another article that doesn’t add much to the literature, but raises an interesting idea.  Again, your comments are invited…

Reference: Williams, B., & Boyle M. (2008). The use of interactive wireless keypads for interprofessional learning experiences by undergraduate emergency health students. International Journal of Education and Development Using ICT, 4(1).

Notes: This article has features results from a survey of students using clickers in a “foundations of health” course taken by emergency health students as well as students majoring in “nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, midwifery, health science, and social work.”  The authors refer to this as interprofessional education, “learning that represents a way of fostering collaborative and seamless, integrated patient-care education.”  I first heard about this approach from my POD Network colleague Marilla Svinicki, who is involved in interprofessional education at the Clinical Education Center affiliated with the University of Texas-Austin.  The CEC is an impressive initiative.

I was interested to hear how clickers would play out in this setting, one featuring students with a diverse set of backgrounds and career goals.  However, the course is a first-year course, so the students weren’t likely to have differentiated themselves yet.  Moreover, there’s no attention paid to these different majors in the survey results that are reported here.  (The survey results are very positive, however, and are in keeping with other surveys I’ve mentioned here on the blog before.)

Have you used clickers in a course that included groups of students from different majors?  I can imagine forming heterogeneous student groups, then giving each group a single clicker as part of small-group activities during class.  How would you teach a course like this?

Update: Just a couple of days after posting this, I learned that Vanderbilt University has an interprofessional program something like the one at UT-Austin.  The Vanderbilt program involves medical and nursing students from Vanderbilt and social work students from Tennessee State University.  The students work together (with mentors) in clinical settings half a day per week and participate in classroom-based learning (using reflective exercises and case study activities) half a day a week, as well.  The rest of the week they participate in their respective programs as normal.  Given the complex nature of health care today, this seems like an incredibly sensible approach to health professions education.

Image: “Colourful Army” by Flickr user maistora / Creative Commons licensed